


Recursion

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld
Genre: Gen, wibbly wobbly timey wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:02:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25008142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: I’m quite certain this is what is implied in The Science of Discworld
Relationships: Great A’Tuin & Humans
Kudos: 16





	Recursion

**Author's Note:**

> Quotes are from The Science of Discworld and The Colour of Magic

_When the end finally came, it took only a day. The lines folded around the centre of the world, writhing incandescently across hundreds of miles of snow. The necklace tore apart far above._

Cables snapped and a string of spaceships were flung out from the orbit of the Earth. This was more or less according to plan. 

There were errors in the machinery but these were expected and planned for. The population of Earth evacuating the planet had, in recent centuries, developed an extraordinary and widespread capacity for mathematics at the same time as, in many languages, the standardization of spelling had all but completely become a thing of the past. 

The Earth was in an ice age. That would be alright except for the fact that the humans had precipitated it and felt bad about it. And there were impact events coming. Most of the spaceships were full of plants and non-human animals in self-sustaining ecosystems. Some species were preserved as seeds or cryogenically frozen. All of the ships were flown by computers, although the ones with humans and some of the aquatic ones had manual—well, not strictly manual in the case of the aquatic ships—override options.

A few million years earlier, in the heart of a dying star in the center of the structure known as New General Catalog 6210 (or as the humans leaving Earth would call it, Nu Jenrahl Catta log 6210 22-10-1998ce) a new element was forged. It didn’t fit into the ancient periodic table, but the humans, with their dazzling mathematics would have no trouble understanding and describing it. This element was incorporated into the chemical makeup of the body of a lifeform adapted to interstellar space. A lifeform that evolved in the strong field of a force which, though not yet described, the humans would also have no trouble understanding. They had always believed in it, after all. 

These animals laid their eggs in planetary nebulae where this force was strong and returned when they hatched.

The human spaceships flew in formation, one city ship to four ships carrying oceans, forests and seed catalogs. Each of these flocks set out in a different direction away from the planet.

The cities grew used to life in the void and after a few generations they didn’t worry about where the computer was taking them. 

One of the flocks met something in the space between the stars. Vast as a world, swimming through the dark. There was a field around it, almost like electromagnetism if electromagnetism was written for piano and suddenly offered a hundred piece orchestra. 

The flock didn’t land. The creature, almost lazily, turned a flipper, spun into a spiral and caught them on the circular layer of rock and ice adhered the back of the smaller creatures standing on their back. 

In time most of the humans forgot most of the mathematics, but it took much longer to re-invent spelling. 

In a universe that built itself several times over...

A world within a world within a world...

World and mirror of worlds...

_In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part..._

_See..._

_Great A'Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf_


End file.
